WHY STUDY HISTORY?
Civic education can help us to see that not all problems have solutions, to live with tentative answers, to accept compromise, to embrace responsibilities as well as rights—to understand that democracy is a way of living, not a settled destination.
WHY STUDY HISTORY?
Civic education can help us to see that not all problems have solutions, to live with tentative answers, to accept compromise, to embrace responsibilities as well as rights—to understand that democracy is a way of living, not a settled destination.
WHY STUDY HISTORY?
Civic education can help us to see that not all problems have solutions, to live with tentative answers, to accept compromise, to embrace responsibilities as well as rights—to understand that democracy is a way of living, not a settled destination.
EIGHTEEN NINETY-TWO WAS A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION year, and the exchanges between Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, which were notably superficial and sometimes unsavory, avoided most of the toughest questions facing Americans at the time. Perhaps it was no accident, then, that at year’s end the illustrious Committee of Ten’s subcommittee on history (including Woodrow Wilson) proclaimed the need for all high school students, whether or not they were college-bound, to take four years of history courses about America and the outside world. Why? The study of history, they said, best prepared the student to exert “a salutary influence upon the affairs of his country,” because it best promoted “the invaluable mental power which we call judgment.
When students, and school boards, ask, Why history? What are we supposed to be getting out of this? the best answer is still that one word: judgment. We demand it of all professionals: doctors, lawyers, chefs, and quarterbacks. And we need it most in the profession of citizen, which, like it or not, exercise it or not, we all are born into. Just as surely, candidates for public office need to know that a fair number of citizens possess judgment. Cleveland and Harrison were not simpletons. Like most political leaders, they knew more than they dared to say, and worried more than they dared to show. The Committee of Ten put civic education at the top of the school agenda because they saw a need to raise the level of political debate in the country. We still need to do it; not much has changed since then. The great committee’s recommendations were not widely adopted, or for very long.
People asked then, as they ask now, Why history, and why so much of it? What does the past have to do with preparing citizens for the next century? Why isn’t a civics or American-government course good enough? The answer goes back to judgment, which requires more than knowing where the tools of self-government are and how to wield them. Judgment implies nothing less than wisdom—an even bigger word—about human nature and society. It takes a sense of the tragic and of the comic to make a citizen of good judgment. It takes a bone-deep understanding of how hard it is to preserve civilization or to better human life, and of how these have nonetheless been done repeatedly in the past. It takes a sense of paradox, so as not to be surprised when failure teaches us more than victory does or when we slip from triumph to folly. And maybe most of all it takes a practiced eye for the beauty of work well done, in daily human acts of nurture. Tragedy, comedy, paradox, and beauty are not the ordinary stuff of even the best courses in civics and government. But history, along with biography and literature, if they are well taught, cannot help but convey them.
This year another committee, of distinguished historians and outstanding schoolteachers, spelled out those historical habits of mind that promote judgment. Studying history, said the Bradley Commission on History in Schools, helps students to develop a sense of “shared humanity”; to understand themselves and “otherness,” by learning how they resemble and how they differ from other people, over time and space; to question stereotypes of others, and of themselves; to discern the difference between fact and conjecture; to grasp the complexity of historical cause; to distrust the simple answer and the dismissive explanation; to respect particularity and avoid false analogy; to recognize the abuse of historical “lessons,” and to weigh the possible consequences of such abuse; to consider that ignorance of the past may make us prisoners of it; to realize that not all problems have solutions; to be prepared for the irrational, the accidental, in human affairs; and to grasp the power of ideas and character in history.
Such habits of mind are the fruits of civic education, which casual observers (and many educators) mistakenly think is easier and naturally more interesting for students than other school subjects. History and social-studies teachers know better. With Tocqueville, they know that teaching the art of democratic politics is extraordinarily difficult, demanding more of learners than other subjects do, not only while they learn but also afterward, in the conduct of their lives. One reason for the difficulty, as Tocqueville explained in Democracy in America, is that many of the most vital problems for democratic politics are not solvable in any neat or final way.
To take Tocqueville’s foremost example, democracies cherish both liberty and equality, both personal freedom and social justice. There is no recipe for just the right blend, in any given situation, of liberty and equality. The two impulses inevitably clash, yet each is indispensable to the preservation of a bearable level of the other. Civic education teaches the young why this is so, by presenting the tough historical experiences that have convinced us of it. Young people need to see that conflict is to be expected and is not some failure of a system that should run itself and leave them alone.
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Thus civic education is difficult because it asks people to accept the burdens of living with tentative answers, with unfinished and often dangerous business. It asks them to accept costs and compromises, to take on responsibilities as eagerly as they claim rights, to honor the interests of others while pursuing their own, to respect the needs of future generations, to speak the truth and do the right thing when falsehood and the wrong thing would be more profitable, and generally to restrain their appetites and expectations—all this while working to inform themselves on the multiple problems and choices their elected servants confront.
It is easy enough to lay out these wholesome values and attitudes in classroom lessons and have the students repeat the phrases and swear devotion to them in quizzes and papers. And it is not so hard even to practice them, provided that a certain level of morale prevails. There is no trick to virtuous behavior when things are going well. Most people will hold ethical attitudes, without much formal instruction, when they feel themselves to be free, secure, and justly treated.
WHEN STUDENTS ASK WHY THEY MUST STUDY HIStory, they are entitled to some such answer as this. They have the right to know our purposes, why we ask so much of them, and why we have no choice but to do so, in fairness to them and to the larger society. Why try to deny that it is hard to gain historical perspective on the adventures of democratic ideas, or their vulnerability in times of stress?
Hard, yes, but how much more engaging, and less burdensome, than to memorize the parades of dates, names, and facts that students have so long complained about. Historical study, the Bradley Commission said, should “focus upon broad, significant themes and questions, rather than short-lived memorization of fact without context.”
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What are those “broad, significant themes and questions” that in the history of the United States would bring life to the facts and promote wisdom about ourselves and our place in the world? In a single year’s course—all that is required in most high schools today—that purports to cover everything from the Mayans to moon landings, the choice of a few major themes is imperative.
The story of American democracy must be one of these. This means political history, broadly defined—not a recital of successive presidential Administrations, names, dates, laws, and elections but the story of the slow, unsteady journey of liberty and justice, together with the economic, social, religious, and other forces that barred or smoothed the way, and with careful looks at advances and retreats made, and at the distance yet to be covered.
Three questions, for example, are central to civic education and today’s politics: What conditions—geographic, military, economic, social, technological—have nurtured democratic society, and what happens when conditions change? What ideas, values, and educational forces have promoted freedom and justice for us in the past, and can we take these for granted now? What have Americans in each generation actually done to extend democracy, and what needs doing still? Such questions, which have no final, agreed-upon answers, demand exploration if students are to be prepared for citizenship.
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